Magic Spot Flowing

The Urbanophile reprinted a post from the Where Blog (which looks like a neat blog) that caught my attention, since it drew a comparison between language and urban development.

I don’t know that much about urban development yet, but it fascinates me, and I do know something about language. The problem is that the something that I know suggests that this may be a poor analogy.

Drew writes:

Hence DFW’s conclusion. We can’t assume those planning our cities are credible just because they’re making the plans. But we need rules and guidance—an entirely hands-off approach will create interesting cities with multitudes of serious problems.

Here he’s analogizing between urban planners and prescriptive linguists. But David Foster Wallace’s essay (and further works), wherein he arrives at the conclusion that prescriptivism is needed, has been taken apart by better linguists and bloggers than I, Language Log and Language Hat. Language Log has a whole category called Prescriptivist Poppycock.

This all suggests a rather different analogy between urban planners and prescriptivists, namely that they are talking nonsense well over half the time and for the most part we’d be better off without them, because the object of their concern is perfectly capable of developing organically and effectively, entirely on its own, in ways that serve its function.

For what it’s worth, that doesn’t strike me as particularly valid either. But since it’s an equally good, or maybe better, description of the relationship of prescriptivists to language, I’d recommend that urbanists be careful taking prescriptivists as their model!

Nevertheless, I think Drew makes a valid point in the final paragraph:

Maybe this is why urbanists keep returning to Jane Jacobs. She reconciles these approaches in The Death and Life of Great American Cities by merging a Descriptivist’s eye for the way cities actually are (not how they should be) with a Prescriptivist’s desire to make cities better—by nurturing what’s already good in those cities rather than trying to recreate them.

In agreeing with the final idea, I might resurrect the analogy at a more sophisticated level: both urban planners and prescriptivists ostensibly want to make things better, and both can easily end up doing nothing of the sort, because the systems they are trying to manipulate are organic and complex and don’t necessarily respond the way you expect to manipulation.

I noticed this morning that in a conversation yesterday I used the phrase “some ones that” when I could just as easily have some “some that” (or “ones that”):

I bought new gloves
some ones from REI that are lobster-claw

I was curious to see if this is common. It’s at least common enough that most of the top ten Google hits for “some ones that” are for this construction. It gets fewer hits than “some that”, which is clearly the more straightforward and official construction (all the “some ones that” hits are clearly from user-created content, compared to “some that” which brings up titles of articles, books, etc.

It may not really be produced intentionally — perhaps we are going to say “some [nouns] that” but realize that the referent is too close? I’m not always a fan of assuming people don’t intend to produce what they produced, but I don’t see otherwise why “some that” wouldn’t be produced instead.

I should have known this, but I didn’t: squib is a real English word, with a meaning that lends itself to the metaphorical extension used in the Harry Potter series.

Also, rodomontade and enjambment.

” ‘With any luck we will be able to ftp some suitable software and get it running on the Tera.’
‘The Terror?’
‘Tera. As in Teraflops.’
‘That does me no good at all. When you say “as in” you are supposed to give me something more familiar to relate it to.’ “

I got a Portland Water Bureau Drinking Water Quality Report in my mailbox today. There’s a section where they list contaminants, including Radium, which is measured in picocuries per liter. There’s also a “Definitions” section which defines picocuries per liter, among other things. The definition is:
“Picocurie is a measurement of radioactivity. One picocurie is a trillion times smaller than one curie.”

Note to the PWB: please see the above Cryptonomicon excerpt for my reaction to this definition.

I got linked by Arnold Zwicky!

The trackback ended up on the first entry in that month, because his link doesn’t lead to the entry itself, but rather to all entries for the month of August, of which that one appears to be first, but is actually the last. In blogging “the last shall be first”, I suppose.

And now I’m peevishly complaining about someone blogging about my peeveblogging. But I’m still not peeveblogging about peeveblogging about peeves.

I haven’t found any new written resumptive pronouns in a while, but I discovered one today on the TinyURL website:

Are you posting something that you don’t want people to know what the URL is because it might give away that it’s an affiliate link?

Well, if you are, I suggest that you not use TinyURL — be honest. But feel free to use a resumptive pronoun while doing so.

Language Log extols Edinburgh Uni’s results in the UK’s RAE

“But with these figures out, even these shy people will have to admit, if pressed, that if you want to study in the biggest language sciences community in the U.K., and the best one as judged by volume of work judged to be of world-leading quality, it looks like you should make plans to head for Edinburgh.”

As a graduate, all I can say is, heck yeah.

I don’t often create posts that involve extensive quotations from other blogs, but I so enjoyed Prof. Pullum’s Language Log entry on vagueness and British weather that I feel compelled to quote it here:

Those many idealistic souls who imagine that we would do better with a language that was free of vagueness and ambiguity, its terms tightly defined so that the meaning of what we said would always be sharp and clear, forget about tasks like trying to summarize British weather in a few seconds before the news headlines. In that context you’re glad of vague hand-waving idioms of generality like by and large, and hedging adverbs like pretty, and sweeping emotion-laden adjectives ranging from human psychology to impressionistic meteorology, like miserable.

The weather as I write (it’s after 9 a.m. now, so already the sky is light here in Scotland) is cool and damp. There is a hint of sunshine from behind the thin cloud cover. Edinburgh castle will look extraordinary as always, a brooding grey mass of damp stone a thousand years old overlooking the Princes Street gardens, with hints of sun catching it from some low angle. It’s extraordinarily beautiful. Yes, there will be rain and wind some time today, and freezing temperatures in some parts of the country. But it’s easier to enjoy than it is to summarize. Humphrys was just enacting the usual British linguistic ritual of weather-grumbling. The weather isn’t literally misery-inducing. I take a certain delight in it.

In a few beautifully-constructed phrases, Prof. Pullum evokes the beauty of Edinburgh, captures the enjoyable misery of British weather, and explains the need for linguistic ambiguity. He shows himself to be a master of language in more than the purely scientific sense.

A while back I bought an LG Dare. Mostly I like it fairly well, but it has a couple of problems — even leaving aside the fact that it’s now restarted spontaneously four times since I bought it.

One is that it’s hard for it to distinguish between scrolling and selecting. Oddly, the browser and the other functions seem to have different prejudices. The browser tends to scroll when I’m trying to select, and the phonebook and menus tend to select when I’m trying to scroll. You get better at it, but it’s still not perfect.

The other is that it hates commas. And apostrophes, in some cases.

I use a lot of commas when I write email, and even when I write texts or notes. I like commas. Unfortunately, the comma is not on the main QWERTY soft keyboard, nor is it the second option on the T9 punctuation softkey like it used to be. Instead, they prefer @. I understand that @ is used in email addresses, but I honestly do not type email addresses very often unless I’m in an address field (which is less common than being in a text field) and I don’t think I’m very unusual in this regard. Certainly not in text messages, and rarely in the browser. And while I like having the .com key occasionally, I’d really rather have a comma.

The extra keys available on the regular QWERTY change depending on context, but the one I really want, the [, '] option, is never available. In the text messager, it’s [@'] (so I have to shift for ‘) and [.?] (logical). In the browser, it’s [.com], [.] and [/], so neither , nor ‘ is available in QWERTY and I have to switch into symbols for either and press shift to get to the ‘. Argh. I don’t often need to type a URL when I’m in an input field in the browser, only if I’m in the address bar, which is a totally different thing. Why give me those keys? I need my complex clauses and contractions! With apostrophes. No “its cold outside” for this linguist.

The issue of accessing the symbols keyboard brings me to my second major keyboard complaint. Like the iPhone, the QWERTY soft keyboard on the Dare has a switcher-key that turns it to numbers and symbols. However, unlike the iPhone, it has two keys: one for QWERTY and one for symbols. This is less than ideal. The iPhone guys thought this through and realized: if you’re in symbols already, you don’t need the symbol key. Ditto QWERTY. So they gave just one key, which toggles back and forth.

Unfortunately, LG was not that clever, so there are two keys. The ‘reason’, I think is, that in the browser the QWERTY key can also be used to access accented letters, but there’s gotta be a more clever way of doing that than always taking up precious screen real-estate (the Dare has a smaller screen than the iPhone, although a larger keyboard because the QWERTY goes across the long side) with two keys.

All this makes typing on the Dare a much longer and more complex process than it should be, diminishing the practical usefulness of being able to type faster on the QWERTY.

Give me punctuation or give me a red pen!

This is my personal blog, not a topical blog, but I find myself unable to say anything terribly original or interesting about the election per se. Like many Californians, I am thrilled by Obama’s election, and terribly disappointed that it looks like Prop 8 may pass. However! They have not counted my ballot yet (vote-by-mail ballots submitted on Election Day have not been counted; more than 3 million ballots remain to be counted) so I will hold out a small hope yet. Other smaller happinesses (Prop 1A, Prop 2) abound. So, I resort to interesting linguistics:

“It felt very, like, moving.”

I heard this on the Caltrain shuttle tonight, and it constitutes one amusing linguistic tidbit regarding the election. No doubt I’ve said things that sounded equally empty-headed because I put ‘like’ in at an inopportune moment, but this one struck me as funny.

The other interesting linguistic bit was McCain’s use of “an historic” in his speech, and what happened to it afterwards. We were watching Fox News at the time (why? I don’t know) and they were putting pull quotes in the little “Alert” box. When they did this, they changed it to “a historic moment”. MSNBC, though, has the correct version in their story.

“An historic” is an interesting pattern. I don’t use it; it’s almost exclusively used by older people, who I think learned, or were explicitly taught, to use “an” before words starting with H (that are not stressed on the first syllable, a restriction I was not aware of explicitly until looking it up for this entry). It’s described well on this page. The origin is from British h-dropping, which later receded, leaving this little island of confusion. I was surprised to see Fox News ‘correcting’ McCain’s correct, if less common, usage. Did they do it for familiarity? Or because they really thought he misspoke?